Projects

Project Profile: H2O -- T2S

H2O — T2S in Urban Fringe Areas

Who?

Principal Investigators: Sucharita Sen, South Asia Consortium for Interdisciplinary Water Resources Studies, India
Partners: Carsten Butsch, University of Cologne, Germany
Leon Hermans, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Sponsors: Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, The Netherlands
International Social Science Council

What?

Full Project Title: H2O — T2S in Urban Fringe Areas
Full Call Title: T2S2016
Website: https://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/visualisation.php

Why?

Project Objective: The project analysed transformation processes in urban fringe areas of Indian metropolitan cities. It aimed at understanding how access to water as a consumption good and a resource for livelihoods is changed during the urbanisation process in periurban spaces. The project is structured around 4 research objectives:

(1) understanding institutional change of water governance;
(2) analysing changing access to water with changing societal structures;
(3) analysing livelihood changes during the urban transformation and the resulting changing water demands;
(4) Co developing transformation pathways for sustainable water management in urban fringe areas.

The project was designed as a multi-sited multi-method field study comparing the urban fringe areas of Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad. Through its design, the research contributes understanding into the drivers of vulnerability and resilience of periurban communities, and helps to identify more sustainable future pathways. The project aims at initiating a stakeholder dialogue in all of the three research areas. Workshops were designed to include government agencies, local communities and key scientific experts that bring in further knowledge needed in addition to the knowledge generated by the project researchers. However due to the pandemic the workshop based method was innovatively modified into a three stage delphi-based remote method of pathways development under two strands - local community and experts. The project generated new insights on how urbanisation processes take place in India. It developed a remote method for developing pathways towards the development of sustainable future cities as part of the stakeholder dialogue.
Call Objective: T2S has two major objectives:

To develop understanding of and promote research on transformations to sustainability which are of significant social, economic and policy concern throughout the world and of great relevance to both academics and stakeholders;

To build capacity, overcome fragmentation and have a lasting impact on both society and the research landscape by cultivating durable research collaboration across multiple borders, disciplinary boundaries, and with practitioners and societal partners. This includes facilitating the development of new research collaborations with parts of the world which are not often involved in large-scale international research efforts, notably low- and middle-income countries.

Where?

Regions: Asia
Countries: India

When?

Duration: 43 months
Call Date: July 6, 2017
Project Award Date: April 26, 2018